A Man`s Home Is His Castle, His Fortress, His Prison

March 16, 1990|By John Blades.

Whoever said, ``A man`s home is his castle,`` surely intended it as a tribute to the sanctity and comforts of home, be it ever so humble or low-rent. As the world has turned and overturned, however, those words might have been uttered by Edgar Allan Poe during one of his more demented but prophetic spells. With the domestic intrusions of the high-tech age, they are truer than ever, though not in ways that are likely to be comforting, either spiritually or psychologically.

Now that TV has become increasingly proficient and indiscriminate about bringing war, famine, pestilence, disease, terrorism, murder and other unpleasant matters into our living rooms, especially during sweeps months, contemporary man has been forced to devise new and more effective methods for dealing with the omnipresent evils that these secondhand but alarmingly real images represent.

To do so, he has turned his castle into a fortress, where he can-by means of a button, dial or keyboard-work, shop, worship, vegetate or socialize, without having to reach out and physically touch someone. While not equipped with impregnable walls, battlements, drawbridge or moat, the 1990s-style fortress, whether mansion or bungalow, penthouse or brownstone, does have equivalent protection in the form of deadbolt locks, steel doors, peepholes, electronic alarms and other sophisticated security devices.

All of these measures are designed to shelter its inhabitants from the monsters that lurk on their doorsteps, to say nothing of the pillaging mobs and savage Visigoths marshaling just down the block. Having secured his fortress, our embattled homeowner then joins his family around the electronic hearth, where they seek and occasionally find relief from the surreal world (a tableau mort that is straight out of the ``The Simpsons,`` TV`s newest, truest and funniest family archetype).

But relief is only temporary. A channel or two away, there`s always an

``Evening News`` or a Ted Koppel to infringe on the cheery precincts of Bill Cosby and Johnny Carson with distressing bulletins from the local, national or international battlegrounds. As families burrow deeper into their caves, finding ever more elaborate ways to shield, anesthetize and seclude themselves from such disruptive forces, the external world becomes as menacing as those uncharted territories on ancient maps, which cartographers warned were the exclusive province of dragons.

Huddled at the epicenter of his electronic fallout shelter, man has turned not only his home but himself into a fortress. Because those demons just won`t stop scratching at his door, he retreats even further, withdrawing from his family (just as his family withdraws from him), erecting psychic barricades and moats, increasingly perplexed, afraid, anxious, besieged, alone.

What ails him is a relatively new but regressive form of isolationism, an extrasensory overload brought on not so much by fear of the unknown as fear of the known. To invert another bromide: What you do know will hurt you. As the world grows larger and more bewildering-courtesy of the TV set, the VCR, computers, fax machines, cable networks, communications satellites, lasers, fiberoptics, microchips-his internal parameters narrow, perilously so.

Man is not the only shrink-wrapped casualty of this neo-isolationist age. Back in what are usually (no doubt mistakenly) identified as halcyon days, people in small towns and big cities did not hesitate to go outdoors, to ritually gather on their porches, in backyards or at some communal playground, whether on a bench beside a Civil War cannon or at an urban movie palace.

Not any more. Even in the safer outposts of Middle and Lost America, Main Street or the town square is as empty as downtown Detroit or the Chicago Loop after sundown. For that, we can blame not street crime (though the fear of outsiders is epidemic in small towns), but the seductive and disjunctive effects of TV. From behind the barred portals and windows of America`s heartland, the TV set casts a dishearteningly cold and unfriendly light.

It was Emerson who predicted this desolation, perhaps unintentionally, when he said, ``Every spirit makes the house; but afterwards the house confines the spirit.`` Yet it`s still the shade of Poe who might have given us the definitive image of 21st Century man, immobilized at his entertainment center, his hand gripping the remote control, terminally isolated.